


let not war's end be too late

by laughtales



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Angst, M/M, Maybe a happy ending?, Sylvain's typical self-deprecating and self-sacrificial bullshit, The Great Fodlan Bakeoff, Two Dumb Idiots, no beta we die like Glenn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-10
Updated: 2020-06-10
Packaged: 2021-03-04 04:08:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,568
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24647707
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/laughtales/pseuds/laughtales
Summary: Sylvain has a realization five years into his hidden relationship with Felix. One that compels him to destroy their relationship the most hurtful way he knows how. Publicly, messily, riddled with lies he hopes Felix won't pick apart.
Relationships: Felix Hugo Fraldarius/Sylvain Jose Gautier, Sylvain Jose Gautier & Bernadetta von Varley
Comments: 4
Kudos: 74





	let not war's end be too late

**Author's Note:**

> For The Great Fodlan Bakeoff! Themes are _exploration, secret, ambition, devotion, and gossip. _Some are more loosely interpreted than others but here we go! Didn't have much time to iron out the jagged transitions ;; Apologies!__

They got together two moons before Edelgard plunged them into a bloody war. Felix wanted to keep their relationship a secret, not ready for that floodgate to be opened just yet so Sylvain complied. On the surface, nothing changed those two months except that Sylvain had a bounce in his step and a real smile on his face. They stole kisses after dark in the safety of one of their rooms and slept with their limbs entangled under the covers.

There was nothing more intimate than that but it was still everything Sylvain wanted. Felix didn’t change, neither did his priorities. That was fine with Sylvain. He loves Felix for who he is. He wouldn’t have wanted him to change just because they finally put a name to their relationship.

They navigated their new relationship in the dark. Understanding boundaries and priorities through letters exchanged throughout the war until they finally met again five years later.

Sylvain can’t help the swell of his heart when he sees Felix again.

That’s when he realizes something, watching Felix push himself harder and harder each day. Reaching for skills and heights Sylvain’s never thought of striving for. How different their goals are.

He recalls a conversation in passing, a jest about which Felix cared for more: their relationship or his training. He didn’t know how to feel about Felix’s no hesitation answer. Whether to be elated or disappointed at the predictability of it, He supposed in retrospect, that’s when the seed was planted.

He’s never had ambitions. He had his entire life in front of him but every step of the way was already paved. All he wants is to choose when and how he and with who he walks it. That’s enough for him.

That’s when he makes up his mind.

Sylvain’s thoughts are all he has and he sinks in far too deeply this time. One misjudged swing of his lance sends it flying out of his hands and one misstep has him landing unceremoniously on his ass with Felix looming over him.

“Your footwork is sloppy,” Felix says with the tip of his training sword pointed at Sylvain’s neck. He frowns and lowers it, allowing Sylvain to stand and retrieve his lance for another bout.

Sylvain stands, steeling his heart and his resolve. Instead of picking up his lance, he takes a good long moment to just look at Felix. The way his messy little ponytail is falling out thanks to the exertion of their sparring. The beads of sweat he’s wiping away with his frankly ridiculous sleeves. His perfect posture in and out of battle, elegant and graceful. Sylvain still thinks it’s a shame that Felix wasn’t their representative for the White Heron Cup all those years ago. The way Felix tilts his head in slight impatience, arms crossed over his chest, amber eyes looking at Sylvain and only Sylvain in this room full of comrades and friends.

He’s beautiful. In every way Sylvain can think and dream of. Beautiful, strong, stubborn, loyal, constantly striving towards his goals of becoming stronger. He’s everything Sylvain isn’t. And yet, for these five cruel years of war, all of that was his. His to love. His to treasure. His to protect. His to let grow and flourish like he was always meant to, unbound by anything or anyone.

Sylvain looks at Felix with all the fondness and care and love he’s capable of mustering. Just one last time, he tells himself, will he allow himself to look at Felix like this. Savor the moment, burn the sight and scorch his feelings into his soul and them bury them into the deepest pit of his heart because he can never let them surface again.

“Felix,” Sylvain says after a longer moment than he thought Felix would give him. Felix turns his shoulders to face him, an acknowledgement, even though he’s begun tapping his foot in annoyance. He doesn’t even look half as irritated and frustrated with Sylvain as he normally does and Sylvain’s heart almost skips a beat, almost convincing him to backtrack, it’s not too late. But Sylvain’s made up his mind, many moons ago and he won’t let himself indulge in his own selfishness any longer. “Let’s break up.”

The silence that falls like a blanket over the training grounds is truly deafening. Like a mis(or extremely well)-timed Silence descended from the sky the instant Sylvain said those words.

He can already feel the prickling gazes of their friends gawking between them and if he can feel them despite his acquired resilience, then surely Felix must feel it too and is absolutely hating it. After all, it’s not every day that they find out their resident playboy, skirt-chasing good-for-nothing has been dating their resident prickly, I’d-sooner-stab-you-than-admit-I-have-feelings-let-alone-affections-for-someone loner.

It’s definitely a once in lifetime occurrence that they’d reveal their lowkey relationship, especially so publicly, in the form of a tragically messy break up in the midst of a raging war.

Felix has been staring at him ever since the words spilled past his lips. As if waiting for him to drop the ball and admit to it being a joke or a tease to goad some kind of reaction out of him. After enough silence passes and the open door of opportunity to brush it off closes, Felix finds his voice.

“What.”

He’s always thought the hardest part would be the part he’s already done. The part where he actually had to utter those three words that would forever change their relationship. How foolish and naïve he’d been. Because clearly, Felix wasn’t going to take it laying down and the actual worst part was yet to come.

“We had a good run the last five years.” Sylvain says like each word isn’t digging a barb into his heart. His voice never falters, his expression never wavers. He wants all his sincerity to show and convey all his gratefulness to Felix for everything he’s had to put up with being in a relationship with him. What he hides is his hesitation, his reluctance, his sadness. Sylvain slips on enough of a mask to bury those feelings because there’s no room for that here. Not now that he’s made up his mind. “Thank you for everything, Fe, I mean it. Despite all that’s happened, these were the best years of my life.”

He wants to hug Felix one last time, hold him close and intimate just once without having to hide their feelings from the world outside their rooms. Just once, to show the world that Sylvain Jose Gautier has - _had_ \- found true love and happiness and purpose in his life.

It’s too selfish a desire to let control him.

Instead, he gives Felix a smile, the last of its kind and walks past him, stepping over his abandoned training lance.

“Wha- S-Sylvain!”

Sylvain tries to ignore the stammer of Felix’s voice. The rising panic in its cadences. He can’t but he does the next best thing of not turning around and dropping to his knees to beg for forgiveness. He stops ten paces from the double doors leading out of the training grounds. It’s like Felix and he both know. Once Sylvain makes it through those doors, the finality of everything would be set in stone.

He wishes with all his heart that Felix would just let him go and not make him do what he’s been killing himself inside to prepare for.

Felix stomps over to him. Sylvain counts the steps and braces himself. Inevitably, Felix reaches him and grabs his arm and Sylvain takes a very deliberate breath and turns around, shaking Felix off. He has just enough time to slip on a mask he’s not used to wearing. One he’s out of practice with but one that falls into place far too easily. It disgusts him how easy it is to don this mask, even towards the person he loves more than anything in all the world.

“What.” Sylvain says with indifference, voice cracking slightly. Internally, he winces and hurriedly fills in the gaps with a cruelty he pulls from his blood. “This doesn’t need to be messy, Felix.”

“What the fuck are you talking about? What do you mean, ‘ _let’s break up’_.” Felix’s voice is rising, uncaring of the audience Sylvain is unfortunately painfully (purposefully) aware of.

He forces himself to shrug. “It means what it means. I want to break up.”

Felix steps forward into the space Sylvain pushed him out of moments prior. “Why?” He says with an agony that breaks Sylvain’s heart. “I thought- Aren’t we going to talk about this at all?” And that, that grounds the shattered remains of his heart into dust because Felix _never_ wants to talk. About anything. Especially not about the nuances of their relationship.

It’s that weakness he latches to, with tooth and nail. “There’s nothing to talk about,” Sylvain says. Here comes the actual worst part of all this. Like everything in his life, there’s no easy out and his only way out is through. “I meant what I said. I had fun, and you’re still important to me. But this,” he gestures between them, “this was just out of mutual convenience right?” He doesn’t believe that. Not about Felix. His tongue feels like lead in his mouth but he forces the words out. “Picking up girls is nice and all but sometimes I just want a warm bed to come back to without the effort you know? Besides, you never took it that seriously either. I seem to recall you not even hesitating to choose your training over our relationship.”

Felix recoils from him and Sylvain knows he’s missed his mark. He’d been aiming to hurt but he wanted Felix to end up at angry and hateful, not hurt and remorseful. It’ll scatter what’s left of his heart to the winds but he takes a breath and makes one last attempt to nudge Felix into the part of the emotional spectrum Sylvain wants him to be.

“I never loved you, Felix. You were just an easy lay. I’m sorry for lying to you all this time.”

A part of Sylvain sighs and smiles in relief when Felix’s anger explodes and he feels all the hate he’s fanned as a literal punch in the face. It sends him reeling and there’s an unmistakable tang of blood in his mouth.

“You’re an insatiable fucking liar,” Felix spits, face twisted with anger and pain.

“I know. You always did too.”

Sylvain looks around the room. He’s met with looks of disappointment and disgust. Ingrid looks ready to beat him with an inch of his life. Actually, she looked ready for that when he exposed their relationship. She’s surely ready to bludgeon him dead after what he just said to Felix. If he had to guess, the only reason she hasn’t yet is because Felix has first dibs on that privilege.

Shockingly, Felix doesn’t seem intent to pounce on that. “Get out of my sight,” Felix says, looking on the verge of tears through his anger.

Sylvain doesn’t need to be told twice. It crosses his mind to say something, a last sort of goodbye to everything they swore and promised each other after shredding it all to nothing. He says nothing as he leaves. The doors close behind him and it isn’t until he’s in his own room that the finality of it all comes crashing down and he sobs, broken and shattered on his knees in the middle of his room.

This is fine. This is how it’s meant to be, how it’s supposed to be. Sylvain loves Felix. His only ambitions and hopes and wants in this dull world were to live by his own terms, unbound by his blood and his name and his crest. He got all that with Felix. A love he chose. A future he wanted to see. A person he’d give anything for.

And he came to realize that Felix was always meant for more than just Sylvain’s mundane visions of their future. So in loving Felix, he’s shackling him to ideals he never wanted.

Sylvain accepts.

He loves Felix. So he’ll let him go. And the only way to make sure neither of them have second thoughts is to destroy their relationship so irrevocably, there’s no hope of redemption.

Felix has to hate Sylvain with everything he has.

Judging by the broken dummies and scathing looks in the mess hall the next day from their friends and Felix basically acting like Sylvain doesn’t and never existed at all, Sylvain succeeded.

.

“Sylvain.”

He turns to see the professor looking at him with their usual unreadable expression. A welcome reprieve from the looks of disgust and hushed hateful whispers ever since that day.

“Heya, Professor. What can I do for you?”

“Would you care to join me for tea this afternoon?”

Sylvain blinks at them. He’s not exactly surprised with this development but he is surprised the first one to confront him is the professor. Something about that wedges into the weakness in him and he finds himself nodding.

Byleth smiles, a small quirk of their lips that wouldn’t mean much on anyone else’s face but of them, it’s basically a full-on grin. “I’ll see you later then.”

Sylvain watches their retreating back, heading towards the market, no doubt to procure his favourite blend of tea now that they know he’ll show. He watches them and wonders and makes a decision. He returns to his room and pulls out a fresh sheet of parchment and lets his quill flow freely across the page.

.

He’s miserable. That’s really the only acceptable way to describe how he’s feeling. He throws himself into the war effort in an attempt to distract himself from it all.

After his pretty pathetic confessions during teatime with Byleth, things have gotten back to a tolerable level of uncomfortable. To the steady familiar state of gossip and unsavory rumors following him around since before he got together with Felix and they winded down.

The Professor seemed to understand, on some fundamental level that Sylvain thinks is far too generous for someone like him, what his intentions were with his very public and messy break up. There’s something they know that he doesn’t and he is not keen to pry into that.

He just wants the war to end. Ideally without Felix dying even though he’s been throwing himself into battle just as hard and recklessly as Sylvain has. Idealistically without any of his friends dying. Once it’s over, he can fuck off back to Gautier to live the life that had been laid out for him the second he’d be been born.

He’d hate it. He’d do it, but he’ll hate every second of it. But this, what he did weeks ago, was the right call because he could never shackle Felix to that life with him.

Somehow, the two of them, despite not even being on acknowledging terms, are still seamless on the battlefield. Byleth still positions them somewhat close to each other. Enough to keep a wary eye in Felix’s direction.

In a way, nothing’s changed.

Surprisingly, aside from the Professor, no one else, not even Ingrid or Dimitri or any of the ladies that wouldn’t hesitate to chew him a new one, approach him about the matter. Nothing verbal at least. He just gets used to having his meals with his men and eventually alone.

He’s eating on one of the benches outside the dorm, away from the whispers and more importantly, away from Felix, when he’s approached. By Bernie of all people. She sits next to him and he realizes his bench is right outside her room. Of course, he realizes. She can’t just retreat in there without greeting him and he makes a mental note to find a new place to eat in solitary.

But then Bernie does a second surprising thing in under ten minutes and shimmies up next to him, leaning into his side. He thinks she wants to hug him but he could be reading that wrong because Bernie and hugs have never been much on the same page.

“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. Actually, I’d rather you not because Bernie isn’t good at advice or comforting people! But, but you’re my friend and Bernie doesn’t like seeing you so sad all the time.”

He’s stunned for a moment and then finds himself again, bumping her shoulder slightly. “Thanks Bernie, I appreciate it. But I’m kinda the asshole of the moment, for good reason. It’d be better for you to keep your distance. Wouldn’t want to drag you down with me.”

“I don't care!” She squeaks, looking imploringly into Sylvain’s eyes. “Because Bernie knows it’s not true.” She says something after that so quickly and so quietly, Sylvain doesn’t catch the whole of it but he catches enough to know not to go down that path any further lest he undo all his work.

“Thank you,” he says quietly. He doesn’t want to talk about it but the unexpected companionship has torn down his walls surprisingly easily. “I don’t want to talk about Felix.” It’s the first time he’s said his name aloud since that day. He couldn’t even make himself say it in front of the professor. Not that he needed to. With everything that happened that afternoon, he wouldn’t have been able to bear saying his name among all those confessions.

Surprisingly, it doesn’t hurt as much as he thought it would, saying it again. It hurts, almost unbearably so because it still flows from his lips with such endearment it makes him recoil to hear it.

But it doesn’t destroy him. He doesn’t know if he should cry or laugh at that.

“Do you have any new manuscripts for me to read?”

He laughs when Bernie shrieks and slaps a hand over his mouth. “Sylvain!”

.

The dawn of the final battle arrives, and with it, Felix. In his tent. Way too early in the morning. After literal months of ignoring him and acting like he doesn’t exist, which was fine by Sylvain.

“I want to talk. Maybe you don’t, but I do.” Felix’s arms are crossed, barely inside his tent. Sylvain’s hardly awake and ready to count this as a very realistic hallucination. “I want to talk about us after this is over so you better not fucking die out there today.”

He’s still staring at the waving tent flaps after Felix leaves.

.

He doesn’t mean to. Really. There’s cruelty in his blood but he wouldn’t do this on purpose. No, it’s the instinctual unbreakable reflex that overrides his brain and his blood that puts him between Felix and an unnoticed javelin aimed right at his chest. Whether it be because the war is technically over with Edelgard slain that they lower their guard or that Felix catches sight of Sylvain’s red hair making his way over to carry out their talk, Felix doesn’t notice until too late and Sylvain takes the hit in his place.

The javelin pierces through his breastplate and he’s off his horse the next instant, winded and feeling like, well, there’s a hole in his chest. An explosive Thoron blasts just in the distance and then Felix is yelling for a healer right in his ear.

Oh, Felix has him in his arms he realizes. Felix caught his dead weight dropping off his horse to break his fall. And it’s not Sylvain that’s shaking from the dizzying pain.

“Fe,” he manages to whisper, on the cusp of losing consciousness. It slips so easily from him these last moments.

“Shut up,” Felix bites and then takes a deep breath that Sylvain feels with explosive pain. “Shit-! I’m sorry, I’ll try not to move but for fucks sake. Don’t talk.”

Felix cradles his head and talks right into his ear. Clearly this is neither of their ideas of _talk after it’s over_ but Felix can’t seem to hold his words. Not when he can no doubt feel how each breath he’s taking is shallower and shallower.

“You can hate me. You can not talk to me. Lie to my fucking face with shit I know you don’t believe. But you can’t-“ Felix chokes on his words, “I won’t let you to break our promise and leave me behind. I don’t know what made you pull that shit back then but I-“ Felix chokes back a sob. “I still love you. And I realized I never said that back to you. Not once in our five years together. I’m sorry you felt like I didn’t take us seriously.”

“S’okay,” Sylvain mumbles, weak and barely conscious.

“It’s really not. But we’re not having the rest of this conversation now. Mercedes is here. We’ll talk later, Sylvain. Please. I want us to do it right this time.”

Sylvain blacks out to Felix’s pleading and Mercedes’ gentle touch.

He also has a spiel for Felix.

Perhaps the Goddess will be gracious enough to grant them a second chance.

.

Two weeks later, back at the monastery, Byleth reads over two letters, each with identical contents and smiles before burning them. Leaving the words to turn to ash as she walks past the closed infirmary door where a raven-haired swordsman sleeps hunched on the bed of a complicated redhead with their hands laced together.

**Author's Note:**

> Byleth gave them both an intense therapy session over tea after _the training ground_ and had a massive headache afterwards over how dumb and stubborn they are.


End file.
